So... Some news since I last posted. Job's going well. It's a job. Meh.

Shortly before starting my new job I got a really awesome offer to do some temp work in Dallas for $20 an hour, with meals and room comped and paid driving time and paid mileage. All said, I netted just over $1800 for six days of work. So, since my old PIII-600 just isn't cutting it these days, I invested in a new laptop. It's NICE. Sony Vaio VGN-A790, 88GB hard drive, 2Ghz Centrino processor, ATI Radeon Mobility X90 with 256MB dedicated video ram, 1GB of ram... So basically I don't have to get a desktop, 'cuz my laptop is pretty much just as good as what I would have gotten for a desktop anyway. Excellent!

So then, along comes Rita. We holed up here at the house, and everything turned out just fine. Zero damage to the house, worst thing that happened was an outdoor fluorescent light fixture fell on my parents' car and put a pretty serious dent in the roof. However, it also ruined a large part of the electrical grid, and they're skeptical about getting the power back on before the end of the week! Plus, the Trinity River Bridge on Hwy 59 is out, so all the traffic down 59 is getting diverted onto Hwy 190 in Livingston, and they're driving right by our house. I don't think the officials told these people that there's no gas for fifty miles that way, so a number of them have run out of gas. We've already had one person try to steal one of our cars tonight... There have been at least six murders in the county since midnight... And Livingston is making national newspapers as being a no-man's land... Rapes, break-ins, murders... It's crazy. And to top it all off, we draw our water from the lake (and then filter it, purify it, and chlorinate it), and the hurricane damaged the dam, so they're dropping the lake twelve to eighteen feet! We're not going to have water in a day or so... And we don't know what we're going to do. But hey, thanks to the uber-cool generator we have, I'm writing this on my new laptop in a house with no other power. But we can power fans, the freezer, and the internet. Aside from having to sleep with my gun under my pillow, having to shower at my cousin's house in town, and sweating my ass off all night from no air conditioning, life's good.